Twister starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as married-but-estranged storm chasers in the 1996 blockbuster that pulled in $241 million at the box office. Most people, I would suspect, recall the irritated cow flying through the air more than anything else. Oh, and also that Oklahomans were portrayed as, well, idiots. The not-a-sequel followup, Twisters, appears to be missing both elements, although there is a livestock-shaped piece of billboard that goes flying by in the early moments of the above Universal Pictures trailer.
The film also hails from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and you know this movie is going to be even more dramatic than the original because it’s called Twisters after a pair of “twins” chased by the crew. Also prominently figuring as the “Tornado Wrangler” is movie star Glen Powell, star of Maverick and that romcom where he and Sydney Sweeney pretend to hate each other. Whereas Daisy Edgar-Jones (Fresh, Under the Banner of Heaven) portrays an ex-storm chaser who is terrified to get back in the game.
It looks absurd, just like a blockbuster about tornadoes should look. The real-world twist here is that the massive twisters depicted in this movie generally (knock on wood) do not hit Oklahoma these days. That pattern has largely shifted east, but of course, it’s fun to put an Okie twist on a Glen Powell character. From the synopsis:
Edgar-Jones stars as Kate Cooper, a former storm chaser haunted by a devastating encounter with a tornado during her college years who now studies storm patterns on screens safely in New York City. She is lured back to the open plains by her friend, Javi, to test a groundbreaking new tracking system. There, she crosses paths with Tyler Owens (Powell), the charming and reckless social-media superstar who thrives on posting his storm-chasing adventures with his raucous crew, the more dangerous the better. As storm season intensifies, terrifying phenomena never seen before are unleashed, and Kate, Tyler and their competing teams find themselves squarely in the paths of multiple storm systems converging over central Oklahoma in the fight of their lives.
Twisters slams into the box office on July 19.
